1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for performing parallel box filtering in region based image processing.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Many methods related to region based filtering have been proposed to make up for the weak points in a pixel-unit data processing method in image processing. For example, in the case of an mean (average) filter, there is a processing method that replaces an mean value of pixel data in a given region mask by a pixel value corresponding to the center of the region. Also, a normalized cross correlation (hereinafter referred to as “NCC”) performs an operation with respect to pixels between two regions in order to analyze the correlation between the regions.
In such a region based data processing method, a process for obtaining sums or mean value within a region is required. In this case, if the size of the region is large, the number of pixels included in the corresponding region increases, and thus the number of pixels to be processed also increases. As a result, the amount of computation that is performed to obtain sums or mean value in the region increases in proportion to the number of pixels in the region, and this causes a problem that a large amount of resources (time, processor, and the like) is required for the computation.